William Brewster of the Pilgrim Fathers (American Roots in English Soil (ARIES))

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With the four 400th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts fast approaching, this can be a good time to tell the story of the man who was elected as their Elder and who encouraged them first to form an illegal worshipping community in his own home, Scrooby Manor. William Brewster was a follower of the Elizabethan religious rebel, Robert ‘Troublechurch’ Browne, the man whose Cambridge studies led him to reject the authority of the Bishops of the Church of England, and to set up ‘separatist’ congregations. They worshipped as they wished to in defiance of Queen Elizabeth I’s requirement that all in England will have to worship in their Parish Church. Browne’s followers became referred to as Brownists, a term of ridicule in Shakespeare’s England – ‘I’d as life be a Brownist as a Politician – as Andrew Aguecheek said in Twelfth Night.
William Brewster also studied at Cambridge and served as secretary to William Davison when he was helping the Dutch rebels against the Spanish. Brewster was due to this fact well equipped to lead the Scrooby church when they escaped from England and settled in Leyden, Holland, from 1608. There they were allowed to worship as they wished but determined to make the voyage over the Atlantic to settle to the north of the first English settlement at Jamestown.
Their ship, the Mayflower, reached the shore of New England in November 1640 and in the autumn of 1641, after much hardship, they celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag people. Plymouth colony is believed by many to be the birthplace of the USA of The united states, even supposing that honour will have to go to Jamestown, settled thirteen years earlier. But the Pilgrim Fathers will all the time be the best remembered group of English fathers, mothers and children who went across the Atlantic to find a new freedom to worship and to live free lives in a new land.
The story of ‘William Brewster of the Pilgrim Fathers’ is the fifth in the American Roots in English Soil (ARIES) Series to be written and illustrated with the help of English schools. The pupils in Years 5 and 6 at the Gainsborough Parish Church of England Primary School worked with John Haden in 2007 to tell the story of Brewster’s life. He and the other Scrooby Separatists worshipped for a time in Gainsborough Old Hall, which is just down the road from the school.
John Haden is a creator, former Headteacher and school Adviser. The ARIES Project was set up to help schools and communities in the East of England to research their links with early American History. Other titles in the Aries series, also available as ebooks, include the stories of Captain John Smith, both of Jamestown and of New England, Mrs John Rolfe better referred to as Pocahontas, Bartholomew Gosnold, Captain Christopher Newport, William Wilberforce and the Wesleys of Epworth.

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